Karmic Death / Animated Films

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• Abominable: During the climax, Dr. Zara and the Captain give up on trying to take Everest alive and attempt to ram him. The impact from this triggers an avalanche that sends their car over the side of a cliff.
• Happens more often than you might think to the villains in the Barbie films.
  • In Barbie as Rapunzel, Gothel curses the tower so that no one with a lying heart can ever escape. Rapunzel was honest with her the whole time, so she is able to leave. But when Gothel (who had been lying to everyone about everything throughout the entire movie) is tricked into returning to the tower, she's stuck there forever (especially since she made the spell unbreakable too). It's implied that Gothel ultimately dies of old age or at least starvation.
  • Laverna of the Barbie Fairytopia trilogy first meets her end by having the Guardians' magic (which she'd tried to absorb for herself) being turned against her, resulting in her defeat and banishment. And in her grand return in Magic of the Rainbow, she tries to destroy the First Blush of Spring, only for Elina and the apprentices to rally and use their combined power to restore the blush and fully destroy Laverna for good.
  • After turning out to be Not Quite Dead toward the end of Barbie & The Diamond Castle, Lydia attempts to turn the heroines to stone with a magic spell, only for the spell to be turned on her instead.
• Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker:
  • Played straight in the unedited version, in which the Joker is fatally shot by a young Tim Drake, temporarily unhinged by the Joker's mental and physical tortures. Largely averted in the edited-for-kiddies version, where his death is a not-very-ironic accident. In any case, the Joker himself denies it:
    Joker: That's not funny. That's not...
  • Joker ends up suffering this twice, after using a small device on Tim's neck to inject his own DNA and turn Tim into the new Joker. The new Batman puts a permanent stop to him by destroying the device with one of the Joker's own electrocuting buzzers.
• A Bug's Life:
  • Hopper gets his Just Desserts when he becomes the meal of some hungry bird chicks. For extra points as he is a villain obsessed with intimidation, he is terrified of birds.
  • After spending the film lording the grasshoppers' superior size over the ants, it's this superior size that does Hopper in, as the bird is more interested in serving him to her chicks than Flik.
• Done figuratively in Cars. At the end of the movie, Chick Hicks wins the Piston Cup, but in doing so his Pride, Wrath, and Ambition have revealed him to be a poor sport to the rest of the world. His career dies a metaphoric — yet very karmic — death as a result. Although, he does return in the third movie having gotten his own talk show — and still being the same jerk as always.
• In Coco, while initially portrayed as a tragedy, Ernesto de la Cruz is killed by a bell while singing the song and playing the guitar of the man he murdered. Said song is also a bastardized version of a lullaby he sung to his young daughter, and Ernesto killed Hector over choosing his family over his musical career.
  • He even gets a second "death", of sorts, albeit amounting to a Fate Worse than Death, when he is thrown into another bell and crushed after his treachery has been revealed to the Land of the Remembered, shortly after which Hector's great-great grandson Miguel returns home and reveals Hector's story to the world. Hector is now the one finally being remembered, because of his family, while Ernesto's lavish mausoleum is left in a state of disrepair and now has a "Forget you" sign on it. Moreover, Ernesto will be remembered as a thief and a murderer for possibly an eternity, meaning he's so Hated by All there's a good chance he'll be under that bell forever unless he can disassemble himself like other skeletons in the Land of the Dead.
• Corpse Bride. Barkis Bittern, who lured Emily to her doom so many years ago for her money and then attempted to do the same to Victoria, makes a sneering toast to her at her and Victor's interrupted wedding ceremony and downs the goblet of poisoned wine that Victor was going to (willingly) drink. Once dead, he is left at the mercy of enraged corpses.
• Disney movies do this a lot. They've done it enough to get their own subtrope. To name a few examples:
  • The Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs fell off a cliff after being struck by lightning while trying to push a rock onto the Seven Dwarfs. Not only did she fall to her death, but the rock falls on her. And for good measure, vultures eat her body.
  • At the end of Bambi, the hunter that supposedly killed the titular character's mother is actually implied to have been burned alive in the forest fire he caused. Walt had at one point planned to show the guy's body, but after an animator cheekily asked "Well-done or medium rare?" shelved the idea as tasteless.
  • After his attempt to use his army of undead soldiers reanimated by the titular Black Cauldron is thwarted, the Horned King is sucked into the Cauldron himself (and horrifically stripped to the bone in the process).
  • In The Great Mouse Detective, Ratigan uses a hand-bell as a summons for his hungry cat to eat any mouse that displeases him. At the climax, Basil swipes the bell and rings it just before Big Ben chimes, shaking Ratigan off to his death.
  • Gaston of Beauty and the Beast falls off of the castle after one final attack on the Beast. (This coming after the Beast spared his life.)
  • McLeach, the villainous poacher in The Rescuers Down Under, seems to avoid his karmic death by escaping a pack of crocodiles, only to be swept over the Inevitable Waterfall seconds later.
  • The Lion King:
    • Scar in The Lion King (1994) is eaten alive by the hyenas he threw under the bus while pleading for his life to be spared.
    • Zira in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride dies because of her own stubbornness and refusing the help from Kiara to save her life.
  • At the climax of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Judge Claude Frollo raises his sword to strike the defenseless heroes, bellowing, "And He shall smite the wicked and plunge them into the fiery pit!", but falls into said fiery pit of molten lead himself after the stone gargoyle he's standing on breaks. For extra delicious karma, it doesn't just spontaneously break — it cracks because Frollo had damaged it while hacking away at Quasimodo and Esmeralda with a sword.
  • Tarzan's Clayton falls off a tree while attacking Tarzan with a machete, and has his neck snapped by vines despite Tarzan's attempt to warn him (also a Death by Irony after saying "Africa was made for me...!").
  • In Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Commander Rourke, a mercenary who's out to exploit Atlantis's resources, betrays his entire team (including the members who remained loyal to him), and nearly dooms Atlantis by stealing Princess Kida, who's bonded with the sentient and angry mother crystal keeping Atlantis from fully dying out. Then one of his team destroys the balloon he's escaping on, and when he tries to kill Milo anyway, he gets graphically transmuted into crystal by Kida's power. He's still alive long enough to get shredded by his balloon's propeller.
  • Toward the end of Treasure Planet, the villain Scroop is literally kicked into outer space by Jim as revenge for killing a character named Mr. Arrow (who falls into a black hole when Scroop cuts his lifeline) earlier in the film.
  • In The Princess and the Frog, when Dr. Facilier's demonic amulet gets shattered, that's considered to his Friends on the Other Side as breaking their contract, causing the shadowy demons that once worked for him to drag him into a gaping mouth to the Other Side, all the while singing the exact song he was when he was cursing Naveen.
  • In the climax of Tangled, Gothel undergoes Rapid Aging when Eugene cuts Rapunzel's hair with a mirror shard, turning it brown and powerless, meaning Gothel can no longer use Rapunzel to stay young forever, allowing Rapunzel her freedom while Gothel is Reduced to Dust.
  • In the climax of Wreck-It Ralph, King Candy/Turbo receives the ultimate comeuppance for messing with the program. Since Sugar Rush was never his game from the start, he's finally gone for good when he's incinerated by the light coming from Diet Cola Mountain after becoming a Cy-Bug mashup.
• Being an intentional Deconstruction of the superhero genre, The Incredibles uniquely averts having Syndrome die in a manner that is completely his own fault leaving the heroes blameless. Upon making his escape while threatening that he will eventually abduct Jack-Jack, Bob deliberately tosses his car into Syndrome's plane, resulting in Syndrome's death by Turbine Blender. That said, it still counts as this because Bob bought the car with money given to him by Syndrome, who knew Bob was desperate for a job after recently getting fired, and was paying him for his supposed "hero work" on Nomanisan Island.
• At the end of Kung Fu Panda 2, Lord Shen rejects Po's Last-Second Chance and makes one last attempt to kill him. He ends up crushed by his own giant cannon and blown to bits when the cannon explodes. Doubles as Death by Irony.
• In the non-Disney sequel Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, Puppetino, who is arguably worse than the Emperor himself, attempts to escape when Pinocchio gains the upper hand on the Emperor, to which the Emperor turns him into a petrified puppet, and shortly after he burns to death.
• Ruber in Quest for Camelot meets his brutal demise by disintegration caused by the stone's magic when he tries to impale both Kayley and Garrett with Excalibur, but they move at the right time and he sends the sword back into the stone. What proves to be Ruber's fatal flaw is his fusing the sword to his own arm with his magic potion.
• In Rio 2, Big Boss runs a logging business that is cutting down trees in the Amazon. In the aftermath of the final battle, he gets swallowed whole by a boa constrictor as he tries to escape.
• Robots: Madame Gasket is killed by being thrown into her own incinerator in her Chop Shop, just as she had done to so many other innocent robots before.
• Count Grisham in The Scarecrow meets his end while trying to make the bridge leading out of Grisham Heights collapse in an attempt to kill Holly.
• In the climax of Tad the Lost Explorer: The Secret of King Midas, once he gets to wear King Midas' full necklace, Jack Rackham tries to kill the main characters with lightning bolts. Every hit with these causes part of the cave to crumble, which ends up killing him and all of his Mooks who remain up at that point.
• Chef in Trolls is exiled from Bergen Town along with Creek, and later devoured by a monster, as punishment for trying to kill the trolls and straight-up refusing Poppy's lesson that Bergens don't need to eat a troll to be happy and they had the ability to genuinely feel happiness the whole time.
• In The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf the Witchers are mostly wiped out by monsters they created: the vengeful daughter of a woman they murdered for money under false pretenses, an elf they mutated into a monster and left for dead as a failed experiment, and an army of the monsters they created and unleashed to keep themselves in business.

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